Paris Agrees To Turn Champs-Élysées Into 'Extraordinary Garden'

[M II A II R II K]

Paris Agrees To Turn Champs-Élysées Into 'Extraordinary Garden'


10 Jan 2021

By Kim Willsher

Read More: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...n-anne-hidalgo

The mayor of Paris has said a €250m (£225m) makeover of the Champs-Élysées will go ahead, though the ambitious transformation will not happen before the French capital hosts the 2024 Summer Olympics. Anne Hidalgo said the planned work, unveiled in 2019 by local community leaders and businesses, would turn the 1.9 km (1.2 mile) stretch of central Paris into “an extraordinary garden”.

- The eight-lane highway is used by an average of 3,000 vehicles an hour, most passing through, and is more polluted than the busy périphérique ring road around the French capital. --- Chiambaretta said the Champs-Élysées had become a place that summed up the problems faced by cities around the world, “pollution, the place of the car, tourism and consumerism”, and needed to be redeveloped to be “ecological, desirable and inclusive”. The plans also include redesigning the famous Place de la Concorde – Paris’s largest place – at the south-east end of the avenue, described by city hall as a “municipal priority”. This is expected to be completed before the Olympic Games. The aim is to transform the Champs-Élysées by 2030. --- Hidalgo told Le Journal du Dimanche that the project was one of several intended to transform the city “before and after 2024”, including turning the area around the Eiffel Tower into an “extraordinary park at the heart of Paris”.

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[Yuri]

Paris will be a much pleasant city if they curb their traffic. It’s incredibly busy and noisy, and despite its massive density, it’s not as pedestrian friendly it could be.

[kingkirbythe....]

Good. I’m sure it’ll be much nicer.

[mousquet]

Those superlatives in the article are a bit clownish.
A guy downright manages to call the avenue "the world's most beautiful" and "worn-out looking to the French people" in a same sentence.
Can't people calm down and speak like normally intelligent individuals for a change?

Anyway, this plan has been discussed for a while yet. They'd released this CGI video a year or something ago, shortly before the municipal election.

Video Link

Decent plan. I would buy it if it made the area more pleasant to bike, which is most definitely the case.

[scruffytraveller]

Amazing views there.

[JMKeynes]

I just posted the same thing. I love this project. Something similar is occurring on Regents Street in London.

New York, in particular, should follow Paris’ lead. It needs less traffic lanes, no parking on avenues, and therefore, more green space.

Even D.C., which is pretty green, should eliminate lanes on traffic on thoroughfares like Pennsylvania Avenue.

[Maldive]

Great CGI vision for a great city, but betting the £225m price tag is missing a few pages of the budget spreadsheet.

[Skintreesnail]

Just responded to another thread about this, but I agree that cities in the US should take note. Philadelphia has the Ben Franklin Parkway that has seen some recent improvements, but from a pedestrian perspective it has a long ways to go still. The original purpose was for beautification, but over the years too much has been given up for the auto and not enough for the pedestrian.

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by Maldive

Great CGI vision for a great city, but betting the £225m price tag is missing a few pages of the budget spreadsheet.

I was thinking the same but wouldn't even mention that, because we're used to it.
Whether it'd be a deliberate trick to mislead taxpayers and keep them quiet or not, officials in France are brilliant artists when it comes to under evaluating costs.
Lol, it doesn't really matter in this case. it's worth paying taxes. These would be productive expenses to shape tomorrow's local wealth.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by JMKeynes

I just posted the same thing. I love this project. Something similar is occurring on Regents Street in London.

New York, in particular, should follow Paris’ lead. It needs less traffic lanes, no parking on avenues, and therefore, more green space.

Even D.C., which is pretty green, should eliminate lanes on traffic on thoroughfares like Pennsylvania Avenue.

New York has already done this with Broadway in Times Square: https://goo.gl/maps/oixQf9wGHGLKgSDK8

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by JMKeynes

I just posted the same thing. I love this project. Something similar is occurring on Regents Street in London.

New York, in particular, should follow Paris’ lead. It needs less traffic lanes, no parking on avenues, and therefore, more green space.

Even D.C., which is pretty green, should eliminate lanes on traffic on thoroughfares like Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yeah, of course: Eliminating traffic lanes causing more traffic to squeeze into fewer lanes and spend more time idling at intersections and spewing pollutants is bound to make cities better places.

I can see removing traffic from selected streets like perhaps those mentioned (we are doing it on Market St. in San Francisco). But the general turning over of traffic lanes from many thousands of motorized vehicles to a few thousand bikes is just making traffic worse. It is pure feel-good activity. And those cars choking the narrowed streets pollute more than ever.

If cities really want to cut down traffic, the first step, not the last, needs to be making alternatives like public transit much better and more convenient. San Francisco is proving you can't force people out of cars just by being punitive to drivers because people have got to get where they need to go and if they have few alternatives they are going to own a motorized vehicle and they are going to drive it.

Note: Post-COVID, I am thinking of keeping a car in SF for the first time in 15 years because transit is a soup of contagion.

[M II A II R II K]

Champs-Élysées Makeover Inspires U.S. Advocates To Push for Better City Arterials

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/01/...ity-arterials/

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- The proposed transformation of an already great street into an even greater one was met with a mixture of jealousy and curiosity by U.S. advocates, who wondered whether America’s not-so-people-friendly arterials would ever get their own makeovers. — Many American arterials strive for the grandeur of Champs-Élysées think New York City’s Broadway between Columbus Circle and Union Square, or arguably, Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but most are more likely to be flanked by strip malls and dicey asphalt shoulders than chic fashion boutiques and 70-foot sidewalks. That’s because much of the Unite States’ primary arterial network was built in tandem with the suburbs and designed specifically to center the needs of drivers from day one, rather than retrofitted to prioritize high-speed travel when cars took over older cities and towns.

- Some U.S. advocates believe that America’s arterials could get their own version of the Champs-Élysées treatment even if right now, they look more like super-sized highway rest stops than iconic urbanist landmarks. — “We built the suburbs and the inner suburbs around a network of arterials to enhance the car,” said Peter Calthorpe in a keynote address at the 2020 Rail~Volution conference. “We lined it with commercial that is dying now because of Amazon and online retail. We have these ribbons of decay everywhere, [but they] can become the places that we infill redevelop and create opportunities for transit. I call it Grand Boulevards. … You can have good sidewalk environments, bikeways, you can have dedicated lanes for transit.” — But even if the path to real arterial reform isn’t always easy, U.S. advocates were hopeful that their state and local leaders would be inspired by the Champs-Élysées makeover.

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